Spammy Digital Marketers, Key Suspects Behind Big Facebook Breach

In an interesting update around Facebook users getting hacked, the social networking giant said spammers could be prime suspects behind the mass breach of its user accounts.

Sources of the new update were linked to the company’s internal investigation team.

The team believes that it could be spammers, who indulged in this act of hacking nearly 30 million FB user accounts for huge earnings through illicit advertising practice.

Upon the attack, FB team had first said that they will not be able identify the hackers.

However, in their preliminary findings post the attack, the #FBSecurityTeam said that they have spotted strangers downloading digital access tokens in bulk quantities on the social network.

Now, FB internal researchers suspect Facebook and Instagram spammers masqueraded as digital marketers as the key suspects behind the breach, which #FB terms as the biggest one in its history.

FB had also announced that it is closely working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to catch the culprits.

Security experts feel that the digital tokens that hackers have stolen allows them to access any part of a user’s FB account and would be much more beneficial for the state-sponsored unlawful groups.

On the other hand, the internal probing team also feels that the primary intention could be just financial and not anything ideological.

While a total of 30 million users were hacked, 14 million suffered breach of contact details including phone numbers & email addresses, gender, search data and check-in data and 15 million users saw only names and contacts hacked.

And, the other 1 million did not suffer breach of personal information.

“They’re actively investigating this with us and they’ve asked us not to discuss who may be behind this attack or what their intentions could be,” said Guy Rosen, a Facebook Vice President, who takes care of the company’s safety & security efforts, in a statement.